Minority Leader John Boehner is two days into a bipartisan beat-down — a small taste of what he can expect should he become speaker of the House and a test of his resilience as a leader.

Democrats hammered the Ohio Republican for his assertion that the Wall Street reform bill is "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon," while MSNBC host Joe Scarborough aired private Republican complaints that Boehner is "disengaged at best" and a "lazy" bar denizen.

The crush of attention is a double-edged sword for Boehner: It’s a sign of his increasing stature — and of the GOP’s proximity to power — but it also raises questions about how Boehner will handle national scrutiny and a battering from all sides.

Scarborough told POLITICO in an interview Wednesday night that he likes Boehner and was simply reporting what a broad swath of House Republicans — old and young, conservative and moderate — have told him. “All I did is say on the air what they can’t say on the record,” he said.

The stakes for all sides are only getting higher as the midterm elections near, a dynamic evident in Democrats' efforts to attack Boehner on a national level and turn his comments into the latest YouTube moment of the 2010 cycle.

The Boehner bashfest started around 9:37 a.m. Tuesday when the top staff researcher for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shot an e-mail with video and text of Boehner's comments in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interview to Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami.

The clip quickly made the rounds of inboxes in Washington Democratic circles.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs taunted Boehner from the podium Tuesday afternoon.

“Maybe he thinks that the rules that we had in place that caused what happened in September of 2008 are just the type of regulation Wall Street needs,” Gibbs said. “The president doesn’t believe that, and I think the majority of Americans don’t think that.”

By Wednesday morning Ohio Democrats had scheduled a press conference to denounce Boehner’s proposal that the Social Security retirement age be raised to 70.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the dean of the Ohio delegation, said that Boehner’s proposal is “callous, outrageous and frankly un-American.” Rep. Tim Ryan said the people who would be affected are “people who work for a living with their hands, not that wear ties and suits and nice dresses and jewelry and play golf and hang out.”

Of course, Ryan and others were decked out in suits and ties and other dressy outfits. Ohio Democratic Rep. Zack Space said that if “the Boehner plan” went into effect, the elderly would be “cleaning toilets, stocking shelves, serving French fries.”

President Barack Obama took his own shots, criticizing the minority leader during a rally in Racine, Wis.

“If the Republican leader is that out of touch with the struggles facing the American people, he should come here to Racine and ask people if they think the financial crisis was an ant,” Obama said. “He should ask the men and women who’ve been out of work for months at a time.”

It was unusual for the president to spend that much time on a House minority leader, but Democrats were clearly coordinating their attack on Boehner.

And Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) batted cleanup Wednesday afternoon, taking to the House floor Wednesday to say the “greatest economic crisis since the Depression may look miniature to him — but not to the 8 million Americans whose jobs it took away, or the millions more who saw their savings devastated, or the families in every one of our districts who have lost their homes.”

The Boehner press shop has been fierce in its pushback.

“The president is elected to govern. We’re facing real challenges as a country — the oil leak in the Gulf, near 10 percent unemployment, the rising cost of Obamacare — and he needs to lead,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said. “Spending time launching nonsensical attacks on the Republican leader in the House should be beneath him.”

And while a handful of Republicans grumbled privately about Boehner’s choice of words in describing the Wall Street regulatory overhaul — a "stupid statement" one GOP lawmaker said — most defended him publicly.

Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, who often has clashed with Boehner, dismissed the notion that he isn’t putting enough energy or drive into winning the House for the GOP.

“John Boehner’s one of the hardest-working guys I’ve ever met, and I’ve been on both sides of that,” he said.

Republicans say the coordinated Democratic Boehner-bashing is further evidence — along with fundraising appeals linked to stopping “Speaker Boehner” — that the majority is nervous about the prospects of a GOP takeover. And the White House, perhaps unwittingly, played into that argument by having the chief economic policy adviser to the vice president blog that a recent Boehner economic document is “full of half-truths and mistakes.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the president’s doing Boehner a favor.

“At the end of the day, if he's picking on Boehner, he must think Boehner is his own size,” Issa said. “So isn’t that a great tribute to the effectiveness of John Boehner?”

That’s not the story Scarborough says Republicans are telling him in green rooms and behind closed doors.

“Every Republican I talk to says John Boehner, by 5 or 6 o’clock at night, you can see him at bars. He is not a hard worker,” the TV host and former lawmaker said on the air.

But if he’s taking a drink now and again, he’s not alone: As the Wall Street reform bill was sailing through the House Wednesday evening, several GOP lawmakers huddled together on a Capitol balcony to smoke cigars and drink Jameson Irish whiskey out of plastic cups.